BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A]
Today is July 20, 2001. My name is Jennifer Kern, and I am happy, once again, to be here with Diane Vosick from the Ecological Restoration Institute, where she serves as senior program representative. We are here in the Cline Library, working on a project entitled "Fire on the Plateau," and my colleague Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt is also present in the room. We're going to be asking Diane a few more questions, because we just got that information at the end of the last interview that she was actually a firefighter.
Kern: Could you tell us how you got linked-up to the job that you had?
Vosick: Desperation was one of the key factors. I had just graduated from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and wanted to stay in Washington. My work had been in the area of biology, and I saw no employment on the immediate horizon, but I knew that seasonal work with the Forest Service and Park Service would be things I'd be interested in. And so I applied for a job in the Shelton Ranger District, which is south of Olympic National Park, in the Olympic National Forest. I was actually hired for brush and disposal work, to treat areas that had been cut. But I now understand that we were really just an assemblage of bodies that they kept busy in anticipation of the fire season.
Kern: So did you know that as you went and applied, that there was a possibility of fighting fire?
Vosick: We did know that. And it was an interesting time, too, because we really weren't trained, so they would send us out on the units to do stuff. We did prescribed burning on the units as part of our job, but unlike today, there wasn't a high degree of training for the variety of things that you did.
Kern: Can you tell us, just for the record, when that was?
Vosick: [That was] 1977.
Kern: So when you started off on your first day, were you given some firefighting equipment, a uniform?
Vosick: No. As a brush and disposal crew, we were just told we needed a certain kind of boot, which it was our responsibility to buy. And we had no uniforms. We were basically just out in the woods. I don't remember if we had to wear hard hats or not, but we were given polaskis and told to go to work either digging line around areas they were about to burn, or moving slash around, or for a while I actually went around and evaluated fuels. I was the assistant to a person who was evaluating the amount of fuels that they had on the unit. So it was pretty interesting. Sometimes got sent out after rainstorms to check for smokes, to see if something was cooking.
Kern: Did you work in large teams or small groups?
Vosick: When I was on crew, I think our crew was ten, and then we had--I can't remember that specifically--it was ten with our leader, or ten and then the leader. But we did have a crew boss who was a former smoke jumper, and he was a really great guy. We had three women and seven men on the team, and he respected us all equally. He was really good that way.
Kern: And so even with an ex-smoke jumper you never had any fire training per se?
Vosick: No. And when I look at what people get now, and the equipment they have, it's radically different. We did have Nomex shirts when we fought fire. And when we went to a fire, we were issued stuff, if I recall that correctly. And so that's when we got equipped to actually fight the fire.
Kern: Do you recall the first actual fire that you got called out to?
Vosick: Yeah, it was very exciting, because it was in Olympic National Forest, and Olympic National Forest is the nation's temperate rain forest, so it doesn't burn very often there. And we were brought in because it was burning. And I will never forget the fact that we were bused in, and we were just put on the line immediately. And we got put in an area where there was big stuff burning, and we were digging line, and we were pretty unseasoned. And I recall this place where the fire was just moving quickly through the forest, and our crew boss saw that we were just not digging line fast enough. And I'll never forget how he just got in front of the line and just ordered us to dig in, and he got us through the area really fast. But I think we were all beneficiaries of his experience.
Kern: And so what kind of tools were you using?
Vosick: Polaskis. And then we had the unfortunate position, because we were a brush and disposal crew, of doing mop-up after the fire, which is the worst job. I think on that one we were night crew, which was even worse, because it was just twelve hours of in the middle of the night, looking for smoky areas to be putting out. It could be bleak at times. And it was really dark in the rain forest.
Kern: Did you stay for a number of nights? Were you camped?
Vosick: Yeah. I can't remember how long we were there, though. It's been a while. It was several days. And then I was on two fires that summer. The second one was in Idaho, and what was exciting about that one is we were all always wanting to go on fire, because the money was just fantastic. You got hazard pay until it was contained, and you got time-and-a-half. I mean, you just got a lot of money. For starving students, that was just manna from heaven. And so we were put on alert and had no idea where we were going. This was typical. Every time we were put on alert, we were just given an amount of time, and we had no idea where we were going. And when we left the district, they said we were going to the airport, which got us really excited, because that meant we were going somewhere else. And then when they took us into the terminal, they were putting us on an Alaska Airways jet, and that summer, Alaska was burning a lot, and we thought, "Yes! we're going up to Alaska!" But actually, we went over to Idaho. (laughter) I think it's Rangerville or Grangerville. Anyway, we wound up fighting fire there.
And that was pretty exciting too, because on that particular fire, we were put out in an area where there were big ponderosa pines, and they had burned at the base. And we were in this area, it was just our crew doing--we were basically doing mop-up, and we heard a tree crack, and everybody started to run. One person in particular, when they ran, their hard hat came off, and this tree came down right where their hard hat had landed. And at that point, our crew boss, who was not a passive guy by any means--I guess to be a smoke jumper you really can't be--he called up the fire boss and he said, "We are in peril here, and until someone comes and looks at this situation, my crew's on the road." And so they immediately came, and they got a sawyer in there, one of these guys who can take down the really big trees, and then we continued. But we had a great experienced boss that, boy, I think had it been otherwise, for a bunch of people that were basically untrained, it could have been a problem.
Kern: Did anyone ever complain or request a little more training?
Vosick: You know, I think we were just kind of crazy twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds, kind of immortal at that age, and you just think you'll weather the storm. But I recall feeling, as I went through this, and quite frankly wondered who was making decisions, when and where, it made me realize I would probably be a poor candidate for a place like the military where you don't really see the authority making the decisions.
Kern: Could you tell us about the physical test that you took?
Vosick: At that time--and it's radically changed now--we just had to take a step test. You just had to qualify, your recovery rate had to be good enough to qualify for crew. And fortunately, I made the cut. That's pretty neat. I mean, you had to be in physically good shape. That was the one thing that they were pretty good about. But I'd say in our crew there were several men that were not as strong as women, and I think that actually helped a lot.
Kern: Would you do a physical training every morning, or some sort of exercise routine?
Vosick: No. Do they do that now?
Kern: Most of the places that we've gone to visit, they have about a forty-five [minute] or an hour workout every morning.
Vosick: Really?! Wow.
Kern: That was engine crews and hotshots, so I don't know.
Vosick: Those are the serious fighters. Our training was about forty-five minutes to an hour in a truck, driving out into Olympic National Forest (laughs) and getting out and swinging polaskis. (laughs)
Kern: Was there ever a point where you got real tired or exhausted and would say, "Hey, I can't do this anymore"? You had an authoritarian figure (unclear).
Vosick: No, I think we all took our job really seriously about.... I think that sometimes when we were back, just doing brush disposal, people got fatigued and would slack off a little bit. But in terms of being on fire, I remember everybody rose to the occasion, your adrenalin's pumping. But I do remember on the nighttime mop-ups that you'd just be exhausted by the end of the night. You'd want to just sit down and get lost in the darkness if you could. But our crew boss kept on us.
Kern: And were there ever any tensions or uncomfortable [times] in regards to the minority of women?
Vosick: I don't ever remember that. We had a good group of people. I remember several of the people there also were from Evergreen, and Evergreen's an alternative college, so we had this interesting mix of kind of hippies and hard core. (laughs) It never really resulted in a problem, but I think the fact that there were men from Evergreen and everything, that it just worked out well. No one was going to hassle us.
Kern: And when you would actually go out to the fires, and you would mix with other crews, was there ever a little sense of competition?
Vosick: No, I don't remember.... I mean, I think they were still at that time kind of struggling with the fact that women needed a different kind of privacy than men, with showers and things like that. It wasn't without its joking and things like that, but I really have positive recollections of the experience. The funniest night I had in a fire camp was the night where we were served absolutely unrecognizable food. At that time--they don't do this anymore, I don't think--but back then they had these big garbage cans, and they just boiled water in them, and they threw in these frozen packets of food. And you could only identify them by color. And so you'd get a green one, a yellow one, and a brown one. I'll never forget, this trading started happening around dinner, "I'll swap two yellows for a brown" kind of thing. And it just got to ridiculous proportions. It was very funny.
Kern: But you always were well fed?
Vosick: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Kern: And how did your family react, or your friends at the time, when you said, "Oh, here, I'm going off to the fire now"?
Vosick: You know, I think we were all just into big experiences. Probably my parents were totally freaking out, but they had given up years ago. (laughter) I usually told them I'd been on a fire after I'd been on a fire. I had eight roommates at the time, we were renting a big house right on Puget Sound, and half of us were on fire crews, so it wasn't a big deal.
Kern: And it was primarily economically motivated?
Vosick: Well, I was interested in being outdoors. And also, once you've been in the federal government, even as a temporary, it just helps you get a job again. And at that time in my career, I could see myself working for the National Park Service, or Forest Service, or some other federal land management agency. So it was also, for me, a career toehold.
Kern: And so then after that summer, where did you go?
Vosick: I had that kind of wonderful dance lesson experience you have right out of college and had a degree nobody wants. (laughs)
Kern: (inaudible)
Vosick: Exactly. I'm trying to think, what did I do? I actually wound up working in the.... Let's see, I had a variety of jobs, including working in the Minnesota Legislature. I went back home and spent a year doing that, and also doing a lot of volunteering with land management agencies, trying to find a job, and kind of working in a bookstore, doing various things, just to piece it together. And then in the summer of 1978, I got a job. Because of my work in the Forest Service, I got a job as a naturalist on Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, which was a great job.
Kern: What did you do there?
Vosick: I was a naturalist, and so I led talks--gave talks, led walks, told people they couldn't feed the deer--things like that. (laughs) The Hurricane Ridge area is a scenic area that's a destination in the park, so you're dealing with a lot of people just driving up, getting out of their cars and looking out to see what they can see. A lot of people issues, as well as being a naturalist.
Kern: So were there ever contemplative moments when you thought that summer, "Maybe I'll go back to the fire line"?
Vosick: You know, it never--I knew I didn't want to do forestry, quite frankly. And so my orientation really moved over to the national park. One of the things that was very distressing to me, being on the Olympic National Forest, is that that is one of the worst case examples of how awful forestry was in the late seventies. They were clear-cutting areas. Shelton Ranger District could not keep up with replanting, so there were terrible erosion problems. And it just made me feel bad to be working on these areas that had just basically--well, they'd been clear-cut, steep slopes, no chance of replanting for a while, or doing anything to stabilize. And I got kind of turned off.
Kern: And was that before there were acts that would prevent clear-cutting at that time, 1977?
Vosick: It actually was getting worse by that time. The early eighties were the years of the highest cut. And so it was just accelerating at that time. So there would have been NEPA passed in 1973, but I don't know how well it was applied at that time. But it was not good for the forest.
Kern: And amongst folks that you might have worked with, somewhere back in 1977, was there an attitude that those are trees and it's a product and it's okay that we're clear-cutting?
Vosick: I think for the people that were Evergreen students, they were all kind of appalled. And I think for a lot of other people it was just a job, and they didn't think about it. I don't ever remember--we were just kind of a grunt work crew, so I remember discussing it among my peers, but I don't--nobody paid attention to us, if we had tried to talk to someone about forest practices. We were all pretty ignorant, too. I mean, we just didn't like what we saw, but we were not very well-informed at that point.
Kern: So have you ever had thoughts of going back out to do some work on fire?
Vosick: Yeah, this year actually. (laughs) And last year when things were really cooking. Like I said, I really enjoyed being involved with fighting fire. It was a great summer in my life. I was actually thinking about getting my red card this summer, but wound up the two weekends that were required to do it, I was busy, but I couldn't do it. But maybe next year!
Kern: And there's no fear? I mean, now you're a little older, you have children. There's not a fear factor?
Vosick: Only to the extent my self-preservation instincts are very well honed. (laughs) And rebelling against authority wouldn't bother me (unclear, laughing) circumstances anymore. But no, I actually think it's dangerous work, but a lot of time it also isn't. The real dangerous times--I don't know how to describe it, but the majority of time you're not putting yourself in a perilous position. It's just interesting. My primary interest is just being on burns, too, when we're doing prescribed burning and forest treatment, which is the right thing to be doing.
Kern: Do any of the members of the ERI work on lines when there's prescribed burns?
Vosick: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Absolutely we have people. I think most of our students have red cards.
Kern: Will they get placed on the Fort Valley (unclear) fires?
Vosick: You know, I don't know the logistics of qualifying them to do what. They're not federal employees, so I don't know if they could be pulled together as an emergency crew or not, because now there are issues of training--you can't just.... There was a time they'd just go pick up people to fight fire, but now I think fire training, if I understood correctly, was two weeks, two full weeks, and that's why it was for people that were working--it was a two full weekend commitment.
Kern: You'd be ready to do it again?
Vosick: Oh yeah. Yeah. It was really interesting.
Kern: Well, thank you for giving us some input on that. We appreciate it.
Vosick: Yeah. This was fun.
[END OF INTERVIEW]

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BEGIN TAPE 3, SIDE A]
Today is July 20, 2001. My name is Jennifer Kern, and I am happy, once again, to be here with Diane Vosick from the Ecological Restoration Institute, where she serves as senior program representative. We are here in the Cline Library, working on a project entitled "Fire on the Plateau," and my colleague Robert Marvin Garcia Hunt is also present in the room. We're going to be asking Diane a few more questions, because we just got that information at the end of the last interview that she was actually a firefighter.
Kern: Could you tell us how you got linked-up to the job that you had?
Vosick: Desperation was one of the key factors. I had just graduated from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and wanted to stay in Washington. My work had been in the area of biology, and I saw no employment on the immediate horizon, but I knew that seasonal work with the Forest Service and Park Service would be things I'd be interested in. And so I applied for a job in the Shelton Ranger District, which is south of Olympic National Park, in the Olympic National Forest. I was actually hired for brush and disposal work, to treat areas that had been cut. But I now understand that we were really just an assemblage of bodies that they kept busy in anticipation of the fire season.
Kern: So did you know that as you went and applied, that there was a possibility of fighting fire?
Vosick: We did know that. And it was an interesting time, too, because we really weren't trained, so they would send us out on the units to do stuff. We did prescribed burning on the units as part of our job, but unlike today, there wasn't a high degree of training for the variety of things that you did.
Kern: Can you tell us, just for the record, when that was?
Vosick: [That was] 1977.
Kern: So when you started off on your first day, were you given some firefighting equipment, a uniform?
Vosick: No. As a brush and disposal crew, we were just told we needed a certain kind of boot, which it was our responsibility to buy. And we had no uniforms. We were basically just out in the woods. I don't remember if we had to wear hard hats or not, but we were given polaskis and told to go to work either digging line around areas they were about to burn, or moving slash around, or for a while I actually went around and evaluated fuels. I was the assistant to a person who was evaluating the amount of fuels that they had on the unit. So it was pretty interesting. Sometimes got sent out after rainstorms to check for smokes, to see if something was cooking.
Kern: Did you work in large teams or small groups?
Vosick: When I was on crew, I think our crew was ten, and then we had--I can't remember that specifically--it was ten with our leader, or ten and then the leader. But we did have a crew boss who was a former smoke jumper, and he was a really great guy. We had three women and seven men on the team, and he respected us all equally. He was really good that way.
Kern: And so even with an ex-smoke jumper you never had any fire training per se?
Vosick: No. And when I look at what people get now, and the equipment they have, it's radically different. We did have Nomex shirts when we fought fire. And when we went to a fire, we were issued stuff, if I recall that correctly. And so that's when we got equipped to actually fight the fire.
Kern: Do you recall the first actual fire that you got called out to?
Vosick: Yeah, it was very exciting, because it was in Olympic National Forest, and Olympic National Forest is the nation's temperate rain forest, so it doesn't burn very often there. And we were brought in because it was burning. And I will never forget the fact that we were bused in, and we were just put on the line immediately. And we got put in an area where there was big stuff burning, and we were digging line, and we were pretty unseasoned. And I recall this place where the fire was just moving quickly through the forest, and our crew boss saw that we were just not digging line fast enough. And I'll never forget how he just got in front of the line and just ordered us to dig in, and he got us through the area really fast. But I think we were all beneficiaries of his experience.
Kern: And so what kind of tools were you using?
Vosick: Polaskis. And then we had the unfortunate position, because we were a brush and disposal crew, of doing mop-up after the fire, which is the worst job. I think on that one we were night crew, which was even worse, because it was just twelve hours of in the middle of the night, looking for smoky areas to be putting out. It could be bleak at times. And it was really dark in the rain forest.
Kern: Did you stay for a number of nights? Were you camped?
Vosick: Yeah. I can't remember how long we were there, though. It's been a while. It was several days. And then I was on two fires that summer. The second one was in Idaho, and what was exciting about that one is we were all always wanting to go on fire, because the money was just fantastic. You got hazard pay until it was contained, and you got time-and-a-half. I mean, you just got a lot of money. For starving students, that was just manna from heaven. And so we were put on alert and had no idea where we were going. This was typical. Every time we were put on alert, we were just given an amount of time, and we had no idea where we were going. And when we left the district, they said we were going to the airport, which got us really excited, because that meant we were going somewhere else. And then when they took us into the terminal, they were putting us on an Alaska Airways jet, and that summer, Alaska was burning a lot, and we thought, "Yes! we're going up to Alaska!" But actually, we went over to Idaho. (laughter) I think it's Rangerville or Grangerville. Anyway, we wound up fighting fire there.
And that was pretty exciting too, because on that particular fire, we were put out in an area where there were big ponderosa pines, and they had burned at the base. And we were in this area, it was just our crew doing--we were basically doing mop-up, and we heard a tree crack, and everybody started to run. One person in particular, when they ran, their hard hat came off, and this tree came down right where their hard hat had landed. And at that point, our crew boss, who was not a passive guy by any means--I guess to be a smoke jumper you really can't be--he called up the fire boss and he said, "We are in peril here, and until someone comes and looks at this situation, my crew's on the road." And so they immediately came, and they got a sawyer in there, one of these guys who can take down the really big trees, and then we continued. But we had a great experienced boss that, boy, I think had it been otherwise, for a bunch of people that were basically untrained, it could have been a problem.
Kern: Did anyone ever complain or request a little more training?
Vosick: You know, I think we were just kind of crazy twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds, kind of immortal at that age, and you just think you'll weather the storm. But I recall feeling, as I went through this, and quite frankly wondered who was making decisions, when and where, it made me realize I would probably be a poor candidate for a place like the military where you don't really see the authority making the decisions.
Kern: Could you tell us about the physical test that you took?
Vosick: At that time--and it's radically changed now--we just had to take a step test. You just had to qualify, your recovery rate had to be good enough to qualify for crew. And fortunately, I made the cut. That's pretty neat. I mean, you had to be in physically good shape. That was the one thing that they were pretty good about. But I'd say in our crew there were several men that were not as strong as women, and I think that actually helped a lot.
Kern: Would you do a physical training every morning, or some sort of exercise routine?
Vosick: No. Do they do that now?
Kern: Most of the places that we've gone to visit, they have about a forty-five [minute] or an hour workout every morning.
Vosick: Really?! Wow.
Kern: That was engine crews and hotshots, so I don't know.
Vosick: Those are the serious fighters. Our training was about forty-five minutes to an hour in a truck, driving out into Olympic National Forest (laughs) and getting out and swinging polaskis. (laughs)
Kern: Was there ever a point where you got real tired or exhausted and would say, "Hey, I can't do this anymore"? You had an authoritarian figure (unclear).
Vosick: No, I think we all took our job really seriously about.... I think that sometimes when we were back, just doing brush disposal, people got fatigued and would slack off a little bit. But in terms of being on fire, I remember everybody rose to the occasion, your adrenalin's pumping. But I do remember on the nighttime mop-ups that you'd just be exhausted by the end of the night. You'd want to just sit down and get lost in the darkness if you could. But our crew boss kept on us.
Kern: And were there ever any tensions or uncomfortable [times] in regards to the minority of women?
Vosick: I don't ever remember that. We had a good group of people. I remember several of the people there also were from Evergreen, and Evergreen's an alternative college, so we had this interesting mix of kind of hippies and hard core. (laughs) It never really resulted in a problem, but I think the fact that there were men from Evergreen and everything, that it just worked out well. No one was going to hassle us.
Kern: And when you would actually go out to the fires, and you would mix with other crews, was there ever a little sense of competition?
Vosick: No, I don't remember.... I mean, I think they were still at that time kind of struggling with the fact that women needed a different kind of privacy than men, with showers and things like that. It wasn't without its joking and things like that, but I really have positive recollections of the experience. The funniest night I had in a fire camp was the night where we were served absolutely unrecognizable food. At that time--they don't do this anymore, I don't think--but back then they had these big garbage cans, and they just boiled water in them, and they threw in these frozen packets of food. And you could only identify them by color. And so you'd get a green one, a yellow one, and a brown one. I'll never forget, this trading started happening around dinner, "I'll swap two yellows for a brown" kind of thing. And it just got to ridiculous proportions. It was very funny.
Kern: But you always were well fed?
Vosick: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Kern: And how did your family react, or your friends at the time, when you said, "Oh, here, I'm going off to the fire now"?
Vosick: You know, I think we were all just into big experiences. Probably my parents were totally freaking out, but they had given up years ago. (laughter) I usually told them I'd been on a fire after I'd been on a fire. I had eight roommates at the time, we were renting a big house right on Puget Sound, and half of us were on fire crews, so it wasn't a big deal.
Kern: And it was primarily economically motivated?
Vosick: Well, I was interested in being outdoors. And also, once you've been in the federal government, even as a temporary, it just helps you get a job again. And at that time in my career, I could see myself working for the National Park Service, or Forest Service, or some other federal land management agency. So it was also, for me, a career toehold.
Kern: And so then after that summer, where did you go?
Vosick: I had that kind of wonderful dance lesson experience you have right out of college and had a degree nobody wants. (laughs)
Kern: (inaudible)
Vosick: Exactly. I'm trying to think, what did I do? I actually wound up working in the.... Let's see, I had a variety of jobs, including working in the Minnesota Legislature. I went back home and spent a year doing that, and also doing a lot of volunteering with land management agencies, trying to find a job, and kind of working in a bookstore, doing various things, just to piece it together. And then in the summer of 1978, I got a job. Because of my work in the Forest Service, I got a job as a naturalist on Hurricane Ridge in Olympic National Park, which was a great job.
Kern: What did you do there?
Vosick: I was a naturalist, and so I led talks--gave talks, led walks, told people they couldn't feed the deer--things like that. (laughs) The Hurricane Ridge area is a scenic area that's a destination in the park, so you're dealing with a lot of people just driving up, getting out of their cars and looking out to see what they can see. A lot of people issues, as well as being a naturalist.
Kern: So were there ever contemplative moments when you thought that summer, "Maybe I'll go back to the fire line"?
Vosick: You know, it never--I knew I didn't want to do forestry, quite frankly. And so my orientation really moved over to the national park. One of the things that was very distressing to me, being on the Olympic National Forest, is that that is one of the worst case examples of how awful forestry was in the late seventies. They were clear-cutting areas. Shelton Ranger District could not keep up with replanting, so there were terrible erosion problems. And it just made me feel bad to be working on these areas that had just basically--well, they'd been clear-cut, steep slopes, no chance of replanting for a while, or doing anything to stabilize. And I got kind of turned off.
Kern: And was that before there were acts that would prevent clear-cutting at that time, 1977?
Vosick: It actually was getting worse by that time. The early eighties were the years of the highest cut. And so it was just accelerating at that time. So there would have been NEPA passed in 1973, but I don't know how well it was applied at that time. But it was not good for the forest.
Kern: And amongst folks that you might have worked with, somewhere back in 1977, was there an attitude that those are trees and it's a product and it's okay that we're clear-cutting?
Vosick: I think for the people that were Evergreen students, they were all kind of appalled. And I think for a lot of other people it was just a job, and they didn't think about it. I don't ever remember--we were just kind of a grunt work crew, so I remember discussing it among my peers, but I don't--nobody paid attention to us, if we had tried to talk to someone about forest practices. We were all pretty ignorant, too. I mean, we just didn't like what we saw, but we were not very well-informed at that point.
Kern: So have you ever had thoughts of going back out to do some work on fire?
Vosick: Yeah, this year actually. (laughs) And last year when things were really cooking. Like I said, I really enjoyed being involved with fighting fire. It was a great summer in my life. I was actually thinking about getting my red card this summer, but wound up the two weekends that were required to do it, I was busy, but I couldn't do it. But maybe next year!
Kern: And there's no fear? I mean, now you're a little older, you have children. There's not a fear factor?
Vosick: Only to the extent my self-preservation instincts are very well honed. (laughs) And rebelling against authority wouldn't bother me (unclear, laughing) circumstances anymore. But no, I actually think it's dangerous work, but a lot of time it also isn't. The real dangerous times--I don't know how to describe it, but the majority of time you're not putting yourself in a perilous position. It's just interesting. My primary interest is just being on burns, too, when we're doing prescribed burning and forest treatment, which is the right thing to be doing.
Kern: Do any of the members of the ERI work on lines when there's prescribed burns?
Vosick: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Absolutely we have people. I think most of our students have red cards.
Kern: Will they get placed on the Fort Valley (unclear) fires?
Vosick: You know, I don't know the logistics of qualifying them to do what. They're not federal employees, so I don't know if they could be pulled together as an emergency crew or not, because now there are issues of training--you can't just.... There was a time they'd just go pick up people to fight fire, but now I think fire training, if I understood correctly, was two weeks, two full weeks, and that's why it was for people that were working--it was a two full weekend commitment.
Kern: You'd be ready to do it again?
Vosick: Oh yeah. Yeah. It was really interesting.
Kern: Well, thank you for giving us some input on that. We appreciate it.
Vosick: Yeah. This was fun.
[END OF INTERVIEW]